


Four Things (That Tsuzuki and Hisoka Never Talk About)

by Akycha



Category: Yami No Matsuei
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-15 07:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akycha/pseuds/Akycha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The title pretty much sums it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Things (That Tsuzuki and Hisoka Never Talk About)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jude](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jude/gifts).



1.  
Hisoka remembers, of course, the uncomfortably vivid experience of being hacked to death with a cleaver. It is not the sort of thing that one forgets, although pain is slippery, difficult to remember except through details like sweat, trembling, his slowly narrowing field of vision. Pain does not exist except when it does; he cannot remember it except as an anemic, bloodless ghost of itself. Until, that is, it arrives again, searing across his dreams and waking him in a remembered and yet new tangle of nerves and fire.

It was partly adolescent bravado, he supposes, volunteering to bait a demon out of its supposed hiding place in Tsuzuki's body. His new inhumanly tough body seemed invulnerable -- and death held no fears for one already dead. Although that was not, he told himself, the primary reason he chose to pretend to be the mortal the demon planned to kill. Still, he learned in the first few seconds after the blade bit into the side of his neck, that a body which "cannot die" can still feel terror, and horror, and the awful despair of unrelenting pain.

 _We are our bodies,_ he thought with the focused clarity of irrelevant thought, while he lay on the floor of the dorm room, feeling his heart begin to beat again and his cold body draw its blood back into itself. He was no longer the Hisoka who had died, but someone else. It was months later when he realized that he same thought must happen to everyone, to every human being who had ever looked into a mirror and seen the changes brought by the passage of time. _I am no longer who I was._

Hijiri's clothing did not quite fit Hisoka. He liked to think that Tsuzuki's body did not quite fit Sagatanasu either. Later, when Hijiri was able to reach Tsuzuki through the nightmare shell the demon had constructed, Hisoka knew why. There was no such innocence to his relationship with Hisoka. Of course, Hisoka was not dead, as a human would have been, but Tsuzuki knew -- and knew more than Hisoka had expected -- how much pain a Shinigami body could withstand and still live.

Tsuzuki, for his part, found his memory confused. Because he found out later that it was Hisoka and not Hijiri, he came to remember the incident as if he knew at the time, as if he had been aware that it was Hisoka's body under the knife the demon wielded using his hands. Memory plays such tricks. Yet Hijiri was mortal and Tsuzuki was convinced at the time that it was murder; so he remembers, in his lowest moments, being the murderer of his partner.

But most of all he holds onto the memory of Hisoka's blood. Hisoka's blood was Tsuzuki's first visceral sensory experience of him; the demon brushing Tsuzuki's bloody fingers across his lips and filling his mouth with the scent and taste of Hisoka's death.

Sometimes he thinks he should try to forget it, but he doesn't. He remembers it with extraordinary vividness, the intimate contact of despair.

2.  
Although Hisoka does not like sweets, and particularly always refuses candy, there is always a bag of sour plum hard candy in the bottommost right-hand drawer of his desk. Tsuzuki knows this as well as he knows the sugary offerings in the vending machines outside the cafeteria. On days when he doesn't have enough money for those machines and the container of tea sweets in the office kitchen is empty, he waits for Hisoka to get a file or go look something up in the library, and shamelessly steals candy out of the drawer.

The bag is never empty. Sometimes it is new and sometimes it is half-full. But Tsuzuki never takes the last piece and never finds it empty.

The tart-sweet taste of the ume plums always reminds him of Hisoka. The mouth-wringing sourness followed by the powerful yet subtle flavor, which slowly fades, leaving only a trace of sweetness on the tongue.

Very rarely, and usually only when Tsuzuki is not in the office, Hisoka takes a single ume sweet and goes outside to sit by the reflecting pool. There he sits with the candy in his mouth until he can stand it no longer and finally crunches it between his teeth, releasing the sugar underneath the sour plum flavor in one great burst of sweetness.

3.  
It was some time -- months, at least -- before Hisoka realized just how long Tsuzuki had been working in Nagasaki. He never bothered to sneak a look at the personnel records and certainly Tsuzuki never volunteered the information. But Tsuzuki had a habit of mentioning things like "I love this shop, I remember when they used to only sell bread!" and some questioning would elicit that that was in the time of the present owner's father. Or Tsuzuki would sometimes let slip a fact like remembering the modern housing development they were looking for ghosts in as farmland.

Of course, occasionally Tsuzuki turns up for work in a tie forty years out of date and slightly motheaten. It wasn't as though Hisoka didn't know how old the man was, but there is a difference between knowing and _realizing,_ between conceptualizing the idea that his somewhat goofy partner was nearly a century old, and between seeing him in his proper place, among the history of places and people he loved.  
Tsuzuki does love Nagasaki. At times, this exasperates Hisoka, who thinks righteous and somewhat scolding diatribes about attachment, but never actually expresses them. At other times, he marvels at Tsuzuki's ability to continue to love things.

Tsuzuki knows the city of Nagasaki as well as a slightly drunk cab driver, and he takes Hisoka to all sorts of places. They are never lost for long and Hisoka eventually realizes that the false starts and wrong turns are sometimes Tsuzuki's memories of how streets used to be. Sometimes, of course, it is just his legendary lack of attention.

But there is one place in Nagasaki they never go. At first, Hisoka didn't notice; after all, there wasn't any particular reason for the two of them to go there. But as the years passed, and Tsuzuki dragged him to every other corner of town, every hole-in-the-wall restaurant and tiny shop, every alleyway and church and temple and bar and park, Hisoka began to notice the hole in their map.

At first, he thought it was because the place must have bad memories for Tsuzuki. By then he had figured out that his partner had been assigned to Nagasaki Prefecture since about 1920. But later he realized that the entire city was interlaced with bad memories -- they couldn't have been confined to a neat memorial location. Not for someone who had been there.

Eventually he figured it out. He doesn't feel about it quite the way Tsuzuki does, but he respects Tsuzuki's decision about the Peace Park and avoids the physical place the same way they never speak of it. It isn't a place for Shinigami.

4.  
What happened under a bridge in the snow in Kyoto. Tsuzuki was drunk. Afterward, Hisoka assumed Tsuzuki didn't remember; he didn't say anything about it. Of course, things went to hell immediately afterward so it's not like they could have talked about it anyway.

Hisoka sometimes thinks that it is just his luck that he will never know if Tsuzuki remembers their first kiss.

Tsuzuki sometimes thinks it was that brief and fumbling encounter in the snow that gave him the courage to leave the fire when Hisoka called him.


End file.
